There’s no one perfect Twitter client yet, but there’s three pretty good cross-platform Twitter clients: TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and Orsiso. Some of the differences are:
TweetDeck Review
TweetDeck is a column-oriented client: users organize content in columns. On my machine, I’ve got columns for:
- All Users (which really just means the people I’m following)
- Replies
- A public search for SQLServerPedia (so anytime somebody mentions it, I get an alert. I have a few of these types of search columns.)
- Direct Messages
- Facebook – and that’s where things start to get interesting.
TweetDeck can show your Facebook friends’ statuses in a column, and you can update Facebook from inside TweetDeck. Nifty. It also handles multiple Twitter accounts.
Seesmic Desktop Review
Seesmic Desktop is a column-oriented client very similar to TweetDeck. In most other ways, it’s pretty similar to TweetDeck.
OrSiSo Review
Download My Free Twitter Book
Orsiso looks totally different because it doesn’t do the column-oriented display format. Instead, it focuses on circles of friends: your inner circle, your 2nd layer circle, 3rd, and 4th. You can use these to separate friends, family, work, play, whatever.
Even better, you can track your friends across Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, instant messaging, LinkedIn, and more. One client to rule them all, I suppose.
It’s not all roses and chocolate: like the other two apps, it’s built with Adobe Air, which is roughly akin to saying it’s like Java only without the speed. It works on any platform, but it’s deathly slow.
So What’s the Best Twitter Client?
I’m taking a two-pronged approach: I fire up Orsiso in the morning to see what my inner circle was up to overnight. That way I can make sure I didn’t miss any of their updates, no matter what social network it was on. Then I close Orsiso and stick with a more flexible column-based client through the rest of the day to get the search features. Right now, that client is TweetDeck.
